Hut site, Feenagh, Co. Clare

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Settlement Sites

Hut site, Feenagh, Co. Clare

On a narrow terrace cut into the western face of a steep ridge between Gleninagh Mountain and Cappanawalla Hill in County Clare, a small subcircular enclosure sits quietly among improved pastureland, its ancient fabric absorbed almost entirely into a later drystone wall built to pen animals.

The structure measures roughly 6.7 metres east to west and 5.4 metres north to south, and to the casual eye it reads simply as a field pen. Look more closely at the stonework, though, and the original character of the place begins to surface: large, substantial stones of a kind typically associated with a cashel, the term used for an early medieval stone-walled enclosure or fortified homestead, are visible along the base courses, particularly around a western gap and a blocked northern entrance. A small blocked opening in the eastern wall, known as a pooreen, a narrow low passage sometimes used for livestock or drainage in older structures, survives in the modern walling at a width of just 0.6 metres.

The site almost certainly began as a hut associated with the nearby cashel of Caherfeenagh, a large internally terraced stone enclosure lying some 44 metres downslope to the south. The Ordnance Survey mapped the structure as early as 1842, where it appears as a rectangular outline; by the 1915 edition the same feature is drawn as an oval, suggesting either that surveyors recorded it differently or that the visible remains had shifted in character by then. Despite its presence on nineteenth-century maps, the site was not included in either the Sites and Monuments Record of 1992 or the Record of Monuments and Places of 1996, meaning it slipped through the formal protection frameworks that govern most comparable sites in Ireland. Its survival, folded inside a functioning agricultural wall, is something of an accident of continued use rather than any deliberate preservation.

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Pete F
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